For those who've followed my reviews, you know how seldom I consider a book a solid A--as old English teacher, a solid A means I don't see much way the book could have been improved. This one is an A+.
Frances Mayes’s UNDER MAGNOLIA: A SOUTHERN MEMOIR was originally published in 2014 and issued in e-book format in 2015. It consists of her reflections on the South and growing up in Fitzgerald, Georgia, determined to leave it at the first opportunity, anxious to be perceived as “normal.” UNDER MAGNOLIA would be an excellent companion read to The Help by Kathryn Stockett or to Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie.
It’s impossible to summarize UNDER MAGNOLIA, full as it is of meditation on her dysfunctional family. “Once, I ran away. I stayed in a culvert all night, just a block from home. When I returned, blank and tired the next morning, I felt grimly triumphant. I expected the state patrol, my mother properly distraught, my father taking vows new to act up again. No one had noticed that I was missing.” Frances Mayes was nine or ten years old.
Mayes evokes the South Georgia of her childhood in wonderfully atmospheric description. “The light on the islands is white, reflecting off the white sand dunes and oyster shell roads that can shred your feet. In late evening, after a long twilight, the sky darkens quickly, like a room someone walks out of while holding up a lantern. Even after the fringed tops of pines disappear into the dark, the bright sand holds down the light that suffuses the air with soft silver. Sky and ocean disappear into each other. Twisted coastal oaks draped with Spanish moss make the landscape doleful or romantic, depending on one’s frame of mind. In The Mind of the South, W. J. Cash maintained that the blue air, softening all edges, gave us our ambiguous ways of seeing things.”
Mayes attributes her love for Tuscany to her Southern heritage. “One reason I felt immediately at home in Tuscany was that certain strong currents of life reminded me of the South. The warmth of people and their astonishing generosity felt so familiar, and I knew well that identical y’all come hospitality. ‘It’s unhealthy to eat alone,’ our neighbor in Italy told us early on. ‘We’re cooking every night so come on over.’ I learned that the attitudes toward food were not an external custom, but, as in the South, a big cultural clue about how people weave together their lives.” “The complex interconnections of family and friends, the real caring for one another, the incessant talk, emphasis on ancestors, the raucous humor, the appreciation of the bizarre, the storytelling, the fatalism, the visiting, the grand occasions--in both Tuscany and the South these traits offer an elaborate continuity for solitary individuals. Deeply fatalistic, Southerners, again like Tuscans, can be the most private people on the globe.”
No account of growing up or living in the South can be considered complete without the centrality of food as a social bond, and Mayes does not disappoint. “Daily life in Hillsborough draws me close to my earliest, best connections to the South. My father invited his office workers and other friends on Friday to our backyard, where everyone ate smothered quail and grits souffle, Willie Bell’s crunchy biscuits, potato salad, peach pickles she and my mother put up, and platters of pound cake, Pecan Icebox Cookies, and Frankye’s Chocolate Icebox Cake made with ladyfingers and cloudlike mousse. On certain Sundays, our church offered dinner on the grounds and my mother would bake a stupendous Lane Cake or, what still makes me feel deep lust, her famous three-layer Caramel Cake. Daddy preferred her Lemon Cheesecake--not a cheesecake at all but cloud-soft layers of butter cake, with thick curd filling that must have reminded someone of cheese. Maybe it’s the food of the South that makes its children long so for home.”
UNDER MAGNOLIA: A SOUTHERN MEMOIR is beautifully written, a profound rumination on the influences that shape our lives and our region. Most highly recommended. (A+)
